According to interviews Ramos had given to The Chronicle over the years, she was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and emigrated to San Francisco in 1980, where she settled with her seven children.

For decades, Ramos cooked hundreds of tamales in her kitchen and showed up at SoMa and Mission bars several nights a week, pulling a rolling insulated cooler from which she would dispense tamales to drunk and sober customers alike. Over time, her patrons would come to know her for not only tamales, but also her unsolicited life advice and philosophical banter — “I don’t know you, but I love you,” was a frequent musing of hers.

Some nights her route would bring her to more than a dozen bars, but Zeitgeist was most closely associated with her appearances. It regularly held birthday parties for Ramos and posted a semipermanent “Tamale Lady” sign.

She told The Chronicle in 2011 that she was able to put five of her seven children through college by cleaning houses and making tamales. “I like to feed people and talk to the youngsters I see in bars who are broken by drugs,” she said then. “I am like a mother to them, telling them over and over to take better care of themselves.” She greeted them with “Hey, honey” and said goodbye with a hug.

Jonathan Kauffman has been writing about food for The Chronicle since the spring of 2014. He focuses on the intersection of food and culture — whether that be profiling chefs, tracking new trends in nonwestern cuisines, or examining the impact of technology on the way we eat.

After cooking for a number of years in Minnesota and San Francisco, Kauffman left the kitchen to become a journalist. He reviewed restaurants for 11 years in the Bay Area and Seattle (East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, SF Weekly) before abandoning criticism in order to tell the stories behind the food. His first book, “Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat,” was published in 2018.